Everyone could see that I was not okay, mostly because of the “staring into nothing”s, crying randomly, and lashing out at people. No one knew what to do. Some just made fun of me. Awkwardness makes people unkind. But I have allies. R. BabyR. Instagram. My new mental health strategy is to rely on my allies more. Ask for help when I need it.
Last week I spent time with my friend. I told her I wanted to spend the night in and watch a happy movie. I made travel plans. I am on my way to Goa right now. I am carrying more bags than I can handle because I go to Anand and Pune later. I bump into cabs, get clumsily tangled with door handles, and take work calls with my phone between my ear and shoulder, dialing numbers with my cheek. I always make unwieldy plans. The long travel plan makes me anxious. And hopeful. My birthday makes me anxious too. I may be on a train on my birthday. Dear god, save humans from their birthdays. But R makes it better and asks for my birthday gift list.
BabyR gives me her doll, Anna, to hold and tells me she misses me like she did when I had the heart-palpitating episode. I read people talk about anxiety & love, in a way that gives me hope. I got 3 messages, even when I wasn’t writing, appreciating that I do sometimes write. And every time mummy saw me, she gave me a hug. She calls me every day to make sure I was taking my medicines. That is what I have decided I am going to define love as. It helps. Like fog lifting on an especially sunny day, slowly, I feel clarity coming to my mind.
I have been having a bad mental health month. My bad mental health felt like carrying a big bag of iron rods on my chest. Internal chest day I like to call it. I found it hard to smile. But I wasn’t crying. I felt disinterested, yet enraged & irritated. A bunch of things happened that when put together caused more than their sum in parts of distress & sadness.
I got out of a relationship that left a tiny hole in my heart. & just when I thought I was beginning to understand the concept of love. A few days after which I lost my personal space. “My time is not my own. Everything: time, study, bedroom & personal space belong to my visiting family. Our culture never taught us the concept of personal space. I believe that this knowledge is only afforded to people with space to share. My father’s family had none. It follows that our house is/feels small, people prefer to be in a single room, small ones with surfaces to lie down on; your seniority decides the place you get to lie on. Some parts of our bodies are always touching those of others’. What a primitive way to belong and love, like eggs waiting to hatch.” This is a paragraph from my diary.
I had, what I thought was a psychosomatic heart/acidity/gas attack. “Everything seemed blurry. I couldn’t breathe, something was tightening in my chest. I asked papa to check my BP. It turned out normal but my heart rate had increased marginally. I ran out of the room, out of the house, with no footwear on, to R kaka and hugged him as he cleaned fish. Good to know where my compass points when it thinks it‘s dying.”
I went through the worst PMS since my teenage. I cried at a streetlight, barked at a man in a fair, and watched ‘One Day At A Time’ through nights. “Today I broke down on a work call when someone asked me ‘how are you feeling, work aside?’. That is all it took. You can never ask someone ‘how are you?’ enough times.” I fell back to work. But the worst thing I did for myself was that I stopped communicating. I didn’t tell people that I was suffering. I never typed “I am having a bad mental health day, can’t work”.